 Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip. |
| To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. |
| Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline. |
| The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard. |
| Books are humanity in print. |
| Honor wears different coats to different eyes. |
| War is the unfolding of miscalculations. |
| Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism. |
| Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library. |
| Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. |
| For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in. |
| The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion. |
| To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost. |
| No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision. |
| Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general. |
| Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed. |
